Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Purik

Purik is a phonologically archaic variety of Tibetan spoken in Kargil, a district of Jammu and Kashmir in the northwestern part of India.1 Its center, Kargil, is situated between Leh (Ladakh) in the east, Padum (Zangskar) in the southeast, Srinagar (Kashmir) in the west and Skardo (Baltistan, Pakistan) in the north, one day’s journey away from each of these four places. Still today, people travelling between the first three of them must pass through and generally stay overnight in Kargil.2 At the same time, the town of Kargil is also an important hub for the people living in the surrounding valleys. After briefly enlarging on the area in which Purik Tibetan is spoken (1.1), two subvarieties are distinguished from the main focus of this book in 1.2. Section 1.3 discusses the languages with which Purik has had contact. In 1.4 of this introduction, I propose that there was an early split of Tibetan into an Eastern and a Western branch, and that Purik along with most of Central and Western Tibetan derives from the Western branch. Section 1.5 briefly identifies previous linguistic research on Purik, and 1.6 discusses the data on which this book is based. After pointing out the importance of context in both construal and analysis of utterances in 1.7, section 1.8 sketches the method of function- al reconstruction which was persistently employed in making this book. The morphemes with the most strikingly divergent functions are used to illustrate this method. Because these morphemes occur in a wide variety of syntactic contexts and are thus discussed in different sections of this book, 1.8 also serves as an overview of the Purik grammar. The content of this book is outlined in section 1.9.

1 Purik denotes the area as well as the language spoken by its population. The language may also be called purikpe skat ‘language of the Purikpas, i.e. the people living in Purik and speak- ing Purik’. Shafer (e.g. 1950), among others, referred to the same language as Burig (and to Balti as Sbalti), while most non-Tibetan Indians call it Purki, a term that has also come to be used sometimes by the Purikpas themselves. 2 Many natives actually call the town Kargilo, but this is not even mentioned on the official website, e.g. where the common (popular) etymologies of this name are given. Since none of them is convincing, the final -o should perhaps be taken into consideration as well. I have not tried, however, to etymologize any of the village names of that region – an interesting topic for further research.

Map 1 features the area in which modern Purik is spoken. If one follows the road leading westward from Dras, one reaches Srinagar, and if one follows the road leading eastward from Kangral, one reaches Leh. In the southeast, Rangdum Gompa is the last village before the Pensi-la, the pass leading to Zangskar, and in the northeast, the road along the Indus leads one into Baltistan in the north.

Map 1 The Purik dialect area.3

3 The map itself is from Google; the place names were added by me. Note that the dental stops are pronounced as retroflexes, including the one in Heniskot, another village in which Purik is spoken, which is situated southeast of Khangral and could not be fit into this map.